Unit 4: Selection Vocabulary 3

She must have been paying attention in her civics classes, for she insisted on applying the lessons she had learned after boarding a city bus on March 2, 1955.

She knew she wasn’t sitting in the restricted white section.

She felt that she was far enough back to be entitled to her seat.

If no seats were available for blacks to move back to as additional white passengers boarded the bus, then they were not required to give up their seats. That was the official policy.

She was charged not only with violating the segregation laws, but also with assault and battery for resisting arrest.

I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood.

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic].

Barbara Johns could not understand such docility. Pretty and bright, she had always been an outspoken child...

Vernon Johns was a hot-tempered crusader for civil rights, who railed at his congregation and other blacks for their complacency in the face of racial and other social injustice.

Not much loved by the affluent black members of his church, he was destined to have a powerful influence on his young successor at Dexter Avenue, Martin Luther King, Jr.

“He was beyond the intellectual scope of everyone around the county,” she said. “I remember that white men would...listen to him speak and shake their heads, not understanding his language.”

“We’d always be on opposite sides in an argument. I’m afraid we were both very antagonistic.”

She brought five other student leaders together for a clandestine student meeting in the bleachers of the school’s athletic field.

Jones left school in a hurry, never suspecting that the summons was a ploy to get him safely away so that a note with Jones’s forged signature could be sent to each classroom, announcing an immediate school assembly.